


will-o'-the-wisp

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Season 2, character development she DESERVED
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12791187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: “Get home okay?” he asks her. She nods before catching herself in the act of thinking he is still there with her. His hand resting on her hospital bed, his voice on the answering machine tangled in the shattered glass memories of her last night in her apartment. Ceaselessly present.(the first night home from the hospital, following 2x8 "one breath")





	will-o'-the-wisp

**Author's Note:**

> has been sitting on my laptop for a while, mostly out of ANGER and ANNOYANCE with chris carter that he thought 'hmm this character is clearly suffering PTSD how about i constantly have her relive her trauma from a VERY male gaze (c) laura mulvey perspective without actually allowing her to undergo any sort of recovery process or work through her feelings". i really am very angry about how that arc never got any real closure. anyway! here u go its a bit messy but i want it off my laptop

She throws up about an hour after she gets home from the hospital.

She wishes it was from an excess. If there is too much of something, the body’s natural response is to expel it. It’s a beautiful solution, perfectly planned by nature, and it would’ve been in a way comforting to feel. Proof that she still works properly, concrete evidence that whatever is rotten inside of her can be removed.

This is nothing like that. It’s not excess but lack that makes her run to the bathroom, vomiting into a toilet bowl she’s hunched over. In actuality it is less throwing up than it is dry heaving, spit dribbling from the side of her mouth as she crouches over the toilet (it’s been recently cleaned, the scent of metallic lemon overwhelming, and she wonders if whoever cleaned it knew she would end up here). There’s not enough left inside her to really make a mess. Her lips still taste putrid.

Scully feels empty, deliriously empty. When was the last time she’d eaten, actually physically eaten? Was it October? It might have been a plate of leftover chicken she’d had by the computer as she drummed her nails nervously on the desk, reading the medical history of a man who would later smash her head into her coffee table (it had been written so dispassionately, she remembers now with a chill). For the past few days she had been sustained on tubes, wired like a machine.

As for before that, well – that was anyone’s guess.

She leans over the toilet again.

* * *

 

“Mulder?”

“Scully.” His voice is warm, crackling over the phone line like it’s burning out. Scully is still sitting in front of her toilet bowl, and she is shivering just a bit, even though she’d wrapped the coat she’d discarded on the tiled floor around her shoulders like a blanket. She had found her cell phone in the pocket and had dialed his number without needing a pause for remembrance.

“Get home okay?” he asks her. She nods before catching herself in the act of thinking he is still there with her. His hand resting on her hospital bed, his voice on the answering machine tangled in the shattered glass memories of her last night in her apartment. Ceaselessly present.

“Yeah,” she says quietly. Calling Mulder three minutes ago had seemed the obvious choice. Now, the hoarseness of her words and the grooves of tile pressed against her knees feel strange and incompatible with his voice, quietly euphoric in her ear. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the supermarket. Did you know canned foods _expire_ , Scully?” She can faintly hear a Celine Dion song playing under his words, can just hear (or maybe she imagines) the scraping of a stuck shopping cart wheel against linoleum floor. There had been linoleum in the hospital too. She can’t seem to shake it. “I had no idea. And that’s really not my fault anyway, because they advertise them as almost life-long. Like you can stockpile five hundred cans of peaches in your underground ‘break in case of apocalypse’ bunker and regardless of whether or not nuclear warfare ravages the earth by Christmas or by the new millennium, you will still have enough food to last you and your family of four until the earth’s surface becomes habitable again.”

This is what normal is, she thinks, and it almost is – the whole call reeks of months before. A leftover piece of October lingering in what she knows logically is November. The phone ringing to commence the start of two am. It’s October and his speakerphone laugh as she stifles yet another yawn makes the room feel so, so small. It’s October and she’s fighting sleep, fighting his inane theories, fighting something else ( _you could just not pick up the phone_ , he points out. She ignores him).

It’s October and the last thing she sees is her own blood.

No, this is _not_ what normal is, she corrects herself sharply. Normal is not at all the right word what’s happening. The closet she can get is déjà vu. In basic structure and form, it is achingly familiar, but the way it makes her skin feel, the way it tastes on her tongue, is sickeningly different. Ruined.

“Scully…?

It’s November and the half-fear in his voice he won’t give words to is enough. “Mulder,” she manages to choke out. She closes her eyes and clenches her fist, but a shuddering sob still shakes her shoulders. “Mulder.”

“I’m on my way.”

* * *

 

Her apartment door has always been squeaky, and the sound of Mulder coming in is the loudest thing in her home. Later, she’ll wonder at her own stupidity – they stole her and she still kept the door unlocked - and at her own faith. She knew it was going to be him from the very first creak.

“Scully?” she hears him call. There’s a bit of a tear in his voice, a break. She can’t tell how old it is, if it ripped at the same moment she did, or if it’s been developing ever since she shook his hand in September, coming apart at the seams too slowly for her to notice.

In September, that first September, she had secretly, privately, shamefully, relished the way he said her name. A stupid crush, a girlish scrap of a dream that flickered in and out of her consciousness for her first few months in the X-Files. It’s easy to be in love with someone you don’t know. In February, she’d scoffed at herself when she remembered September. Come on, Dana. It’s Mulder, _Mulder_ , for Christ’s sake.

Now it’s November and every time he says her name she feels herself lose her resolve all over again. She leans her forehead against the cool porcelain and closes her eyes and chokes down another gasping sob. “I’m in here,” she calls weakly. It feels like a whisper.

And yet, he finds her (he always finds her, doesn’t he?). Footsteps on her bedroom floor, fast and panicked, and then a sudden stop as they hit tile. Scully doesn’t turn to face him but she can feel him standing behind her, his shoulders filling the doorway, one hand grasping the wooden frame. “Oh, Scully,” he says.

“I threw up,” she says, rushed. She can feel a twin break in her voice. Hers is fresh and the _snap_ ricochets off the bathroom wall like bullet casings, like glass breaking in two. Quick isn’t always painless.

Mulder moves into the bathroom, comes to crouch beside her. She knows he’s most likely looked into the toilet bowl by now to see that there’s nothing actually in it besides water. “It’s okay,” he says. His hand is on her back, his thumb running circles on her shoulder through her coat. “You’re okay.”

It’s an absurd enough statement for her to force out a laugh, to open her eyes. She squints at him sideways, through strands of sweaty hair. He’s wearing a turtleneck sweater and he’s cleanshaven, and it occurs to her that the past few days, for him, have been happy ones. When he brought her flowers after she woke up, his smile had been clumsy, like it hadn’t made an appearance for a while. It had been earnest, though, and genuine, and even now there’s a touch of relief in the corner of his mouth, an aftertaste of _thank God, thank God_ that lingers for days. His November has an upturn halfway through. Her November doesn’t begin until the 14 th, and when it does it is quietly violent. A silent killer.

She suddenly feels resentful, although it’s of course ridiculous and unfounded (she was the one who called him there). “You know I’m not,” she snaps.

Mulder nods. To his credit, he is neither surprised nor discouraged by her cutting tone, by the uncharacteristic display of emotional honesty. Only his hand changes, becoming still and decidedly _there_. Warm against her shoulder. Seeping into her bones.

“I know,” he says, and she feels like the flutter of déjà vu all over again, loud in her chest, when she decides to trust him.

* * *

 

The whistle of the tea kettle is jarring, but in a comforting way. Scully doesn’t mind the noise as she sits on the couch, curled up against the arm, her fingers tracing patterns along her legs. It’s a sound that distinctly belongs to this kitchen, belongs to her very particular, very old kettle she couldn’t find the heart to throw away. It’s a landmark of regularity. Proof she is on the way.

The bathroom floor hadn’t been directly followed by the couch. After the bathroom floor, Mulder had pulled her into her bedroom, where after much rustling through unfamiliar drawers, he had tossed an old t-shirt of her father’s and a pair of flannel pants at her. “Shower,” he’d instructed her. “You’ll feel better.”

Removed from the cold clamminess of the tile floor and the overpowering scent of Lysol, from the shameful memory of grasping at her toilet and begging the world to stop spinning, Scully had raised an eyebrow. “That’s very forward of you, Mulder,” she’d said. He had laughed, despite how funny the joke really was (not very), and had left the bedroom, pulling the door behind him to rest against the frame. Not quite closed.

He was right, Scully thinks now. The stench of the hospital had been all over her. She hadn’t realized until after she scrubbed at her skin under the biting hot water, most likely because she had woken up in November as that disinfected, paper gown Scully, her memories of who she was before disjointed and crumbly under her fingers. Now she remembers, and if she closes her eyes, it is what October feels like. It is what normal feels like.

Not _quite_ normal. Mulder hands her a cup of tea, in a chipped mug a friend from college bought her for her birthday. “I didn’t know how you took your tea,” he says sheepishly, his hands shoved in his jean pockets. “It might be too sweet. Sorry.”

She blinks at him, bewildered. “Why are you apologizing to me?”

Mulder has always been the one with the answers, an infinity of explanations tucked away in his coat pocket like magic tricks. Before the questions had even been finished, a fully-formed hypothesis would be trotting out of his mouth, precocious and absurdly self-assured. It had driven her up the basement wall in October. In November, Mulder manages a shrug. “Sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know.”

She suspects he’s lying, that he might know, but she moves on determinedly. Latching onto a single idea without wavering and dragging oneself through layers of complications to get there – that had always been Mulder’s singular talent. It would be stupid to assume that nothing of him hadn’t found its way onto her. God knows she can feel pieces of her missing, can see the occasional wisp of herself caught up in his fingers.

“You shouldn’t be sorry,” she says. She gestures indignantly to the cup of tea in her hand. “You come here because I – to support me, in a – in a confusing moment in my life, when I don’t have anyone else to turn to, and you’re caught up on the tea? On how I take my _tea_?” She laughs. “Mulder, you’re here. You’re here.”

He smiles, but it is flat, gaunt. Skeletal. He definitely knows, she’s sure now. It’s a fact whose recognition is accompanied by a dizzying twisting of sorts. A mangling of the heart.

* * *

 

Mulder does know. It’s October and he can’t stop playing back her voice on his answering machine. She begs for help ten times a day as he sits in his apartment and wonders at what point did she know he would fail her. Was it when Duane Barry dragged her up the mountain? Was it in the trunk of his car, the necklace she’s worn since she was fifteen slipping off her neck? Or maybe she knew from the moment she saw stars as she bled onto the carpet, knew that she would’ve been better off placing her faith in God than him. At least His silence wouldn’t have been so deafening.

Maggie finds him on Halloween, drunk on whiskey and playing the message over and over again, until the words blurred and spilled and meant nothing. She tells him it isn’t his fault and he says he knows. Neither of them are very good liars, but neither of them had ever learned how to call things as they were.

* * *

 

Midnight creeps into her apartment, for the most part unobtrusively. She only notices when she gets up to pour herself another cup of tea and to make some toast. Now that the nausea had passed, she’d realized actually eating something somewhat substantial might help her to feel more grounded. Less liable to float away, up into the air. Untethered by anything.

The clock in the kitchen has both arms raised to the sky, in a sort of surrender. _Midnight_ , she thinks to herself as she waits for her toast to pop up. Behind her, Mulder is still talking, still stifling yawns. Still there.

“Tell me everything,” she had said, and she had meant it, too. When people say everything, they never really mean _every_ thing. _I’ll take care of everything, everything’s going to be okay, you’re my everything_. Every easy thing, every good thing. The complicated, difficult things, the things that are heavy in your mouth and even heavier once they’re in the air, are typically not included. But she’s still a scientist, even when she wakes up shaking and disoriented in a hospital bed, and the only way for her to comprehend what she can’t explain ( _October, she blinks and its November_ ) is to have all the facts, organized and categorized.

Mulder understands. He doesn’t leave anything out as he tells her about the weeks she missed. The cases he’d investigated, the meetings he’d went to, the looks he’d gotten from the higher-ups at the FBI when he refused to close her case file. What had happened in U.S. politics. What the weather had been like during his walk to the train. How her mother had been. She clings to every detail, mesmerized.

It’s midnight and he’s in the middle of telling her about meeting her sister (and she feels a bizarre rush of delight at the familiarity of the idea). She stands by the kitchen counter and wonders at what point should she tell him to go home. Midnight is definitely a deadline of sorts, an _either_ - _or_. Either she tells him she’s okay now or she never does. Either she offers to walk him to his car now or he stays the night.

Her toast pops out with a metallic clang, shaking her from her reverie. Midnight has moved on. She pours herself tea and returns to the couch.

* * *

 

“What do you think they did to me?”

Mulder raises his head from the back of the couch slowly, his eyes blinking blearily, his arms still folded across his chest. He’d fallen asleep after two and a half _Cheers_ episodes, which they had watched together in relative silence, aside from the occasional hummed response to a joke. Scully truthfully hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening onscreen, instead watching Mulder as he slowly fell asleep sitting straight up, the soles of her feet just brushing his leg. _Cheers_ was more useful as background noise anyway, as a filtering system just loud enough to shut out the hot rush of her thoughts, acrid and nauseating.

For a while, anyway. Scully watches as he wakes up, as he takes her in, as her question gets caught in his throat like glass. Each of them studying the other.

In the hospital, he had stayed silent when Skinner had mechanically explained what had happened to her. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d murmured, his hand gentle on hers, when she’d gaped at the words. _Ascend, dead, undetermined, November_. “You’re back. The guilty parties will pay, but for now you just need to rest.” The reason for his hesitation both then and now was identical – all he had, all he has, to offer her is his own truth.

He sighs. “I don’t know.”

“You do know,” she says. When he says nothing, staring blankly at the television, she’d continued, pushing past the thickness in her throat. “Damnit, Mulder. You can spout absolute bullshit about strangers based on a – on a sentence, but when it comes to me –“

“Because it’s you _._ ” He turns to face her properly, resting one arm across the back of the couch. He suddenly looks incredibly sad, a heavy, exhaustive sadness, that sits in his eyes, that tugs at his mouth. His exhalation is tremendously loud.

She shakes her head. “I need to hear it. What you think. How it – how you see me, after all this.”

“How I _see_ –“ He cuts himself off, his mouth ever so slightly hanging ajar. “Why would I ever see you any differently?”

“Because –“ She blinks, licks her lips. All she has to give him, all she ever will, is long pauses, no answers. A bouquet of question marks, thorny half-truths cutting her palms. Because she’s missing the October he’s nursing like a black eye. Because she has handprints all over her body, and all she can do is wait for the bruises to inevitably appear. Because his sister didn’t come back. Because she did.

“How could you not?” she whispers, finally.

Mulder considers her. It’s well past one am and his eyes are heavy, and she almost feels guilty for keeping him here with her (almost). The light from the Boston bar on the television flickers against his profile. A perfect half-moon. “You’re still _you_ ,” he says, his voice ever so patient.

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

She sighs. “Maybe not.” Her reflection in the mirror, after she’d gotten out of the shower, had been desaturated, two-dimensional. Her lips had been extraordinarily chapped, which had surprised her, and also comforted her, in a way. The peeling skin was evidence of time’s action on her body, proof of an October she would never know. It was real, she was real, she was still real. “But that’s a conclusion I can get to on my own. I want to hear your conclusions.” She reaches out and places her hand on top of his own, lying easily across the back of her couch.

The _Cheers_ theme song, heralding in the new half hour, plays as Mulder holds her gaze, a little unevenly. Maybe she’s being presumptuous, although about _what_ , she’s embarrassed to even think about. It's Mulder, for Christ’s sake. It’s Mulder. Eventually, he shakes his head. “You’re gonna think I’m full of shit,” he warns. It’s such an oversimplification that she laughs, and even though its quiet she can still feel it rattle her rib cage like a ghost.

“I always think you’re full of shit,” she says, fondly, and it is a little bit like being in love. Fond continuations of tired jokes, half-truths hidden in half-lies. Not to mention the _staying_. Always, the staying.

Mulder begins to talk.

* * *

 

Seven am and Scully wakes up with a start, her breathing shaking her shoulders. She isn’t sure why – she has never been able to remember her dreams. Maybe it’s for the better, but still. She has always believed in knowing.

She’s on the couch, lying on her side. At some point Mulder had wrapped a blanket around her frame (although _wrapped_ is a strong word. It feels more like he’d just dropped the blanket on her and hoped it had stuck, unsure of how or if to touch her). He's still there, at the end of the couch, his head lolled to the side. Her feet are still touching his legs. A little more decidedly now.

This isn’t déjà vu, but the complete reverse of it. She smiles as she looks at the way the sunlight from the cracks in her blinds, which have been closed for a month now, finds its way into his hair, onto the bridge of his nose. The feeling is known, in a strange, heart rush, _oh, of course_ sort of way. But the experience is entirely different. This is familiar in the unfamiliar.

This is November. It’ll still be there when nine am rolls around. Scully goes back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, ur comments, however brief, truly in the most literal meaning of the phrase, light up my life!


End file.
